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In Windows Server 2008, most of the drastic changes that were made, you'll never see, 1 or 2 you will, but believe me, you will feel these changes. And I really believe that in the future, we will look back at the Windows Server 2008 release and say wow that was a milestone, very similar to the way we look back on Windows 2000 and the introduction of Active Directory right now. Some of the architectural changes that Microsoft chose to make on the Windows Server 2008 product is going to open the door and lay the foundation for some pretty significant lurches forward if you will on this platform. First off, they made some significant kernel changes to provide better processor virtualization support. And this is just going to give you faster, better, leaner operation. They made some driver model changes, this just makes your drivers more stable and more secure. Obviously, drivers are a huge thing, almost anything we attach to the computer has to have a driver. And so to make these drivers more secure, more stable means less restarts, less lock ups, and so forth. Microsoft totally rewrote the TCP/IP protocol stack, now you're going to hear me mention this a couple million times in the course of this entire series because this is a huge thing. They did it for better performance, keep in mind, as bandwidth goes up, we keep moving more and more data. As we start to consume more and more XML, there's a lot more work being asked of our processors. So need more efficient ways to transfer larger pieces of data, more reliable transportation of that data, so they've rewritten that TCP/IP stack to help with that. We also pick up IP version 6 support. This is going to be a milestone. We'll talk about IP version 6 later, but that's huge. Now, Microsoft made some major architectural changes to the way memory is managed and the way heap is managed. Now if you don't know what the heap is, don't worry about it, but as the amount of memory that we require on our machines and that our machines are being asked to manage and deal with, as that goes up, obviously it becomes more important that we handle it faster and more reliably so that's what's happened here. Microsoft's made some changes to the registry to make it perform better, they've also given it transactional support for reads and writes, and they've made some other changes, but again, the registry is a fundamental part of the Microsoft Operating System and quite honestly, it can turn into a bottle neck really quickly and a registry can become a problem and so they've made some pretty serious enhancements there. Now, let's talk about probably the number 1 change that has been made to this operating system, you will notice this one, you may not realize why it's such a big deal but it is the introduction and the inclusion of the .NET Framework 3.0 version. Now, this is what gives Vista its distinctive slicker, sexier, graphical look and you're going to see this in Windows Server 2008. It's not as apparent in Windows Server, but what's going on underneath is what's making the difference. And there's 4 basic parts to the .NET Framework. The biggest thing about the .NET Framework is that it totally absolutely separates the client aspects of anything to do with the Windows Server platform from the services that the platform of the server provides. Now, those services have been totally separated, totally object oriented so they can be easily distributed across machines across the Internet around the world, there does not absolutely need to be all the servers in the same room anymore by any standards. The first one up is the WCF, this is codenamed Indigo, it is the Windows Communication Foundation, and this is where the new IPC Communication Stack resides. This gives the system the ability to communicate across different typologies and architectures. This specifically gives the Windows Operating System to retain backward compatibility with older products, and again, it gives you that generic treatment of what's going on in the computer world now, that everybody needs to compete. And everybody needs to communicate on a level playing field. The second aspect on the .NET Framework is the WPF and this was codenamed Avalon and that is the Windows Presentation Foundation. This is the user interface. Now this is the one you can see, this is the more of a 3-D, a cooler graphics kind of look, the shiny buttons, the arrow look if you will. And then there's the WCS, this is info card, this is Windows Card Space, this provides access to secured digital identity stores, now Microsoft has an idea here, and that is to give you the ability to present a token no matter where you go on the Internet and provide a digital identity for you so that you don't have to log in everywhere you go. And Microsoft's trying to unify identities across various vendors and applications to more or less make the Internet this ubiquitous network that you just use, you don't have to stop and log in and log out here and there. The last one, the WWF, the Windows Workflow Foundation, this gives an application the ability to schedule and manage tasks, and it provides transaction support in the process, okay? Now, you will hear about these 4 pieces of the .NET Framework in the future. When you hear them, just remember, I told you about them first here. But the .NET Framework really gives developers especially, the ability to write applications that really separate the pieces and turn the Windows Server Operating System into a truly distributed operating system across various pieces on the Internet, okay? So that's a look under the hood, maybe a little deeper than you wanted to go, each one of these is worth going out and reading up on to understand the significance of them okay? Bottom line though, you start up Windows Server 2008, never think about these things, never need to think about them, but trust me, they're all going to be huge for you going forward.